How I got involved in TES modding

Hard to believe, but it has been almost nine (!) years since I started to mod Oblivion in 2010. Even today I still have a working Oblivion game on my PC: since 2007! That’s a very long time of playing a single game.

Discovering Oblivion

It happened in the middle school. I was exploring a marketplace near my metro station looking for a new game to buy. Back then they were sold on CDs and DVDs: Internet connection was too slow or expensive to let you download an entire game. I wanted to buy a certain game, but it wasn’t in stock. I chose another one based on what I read in Igromania magazine a time. The review described Oblivion as an RPG with unseen level of detail and a rich world. The screenshots bought me.

A bit later I bought the collector’s edition with the amazing print of the Cyrodiil map. It’s tattered and has tape all over it, but hangs above my desk to this day. It’s amazing to look at the place where you spent so much time adventuring.

Getting into modding

After playing the game for a bit, I stumbled upon ag.ru, which hosted the biggest collection of translated mods at a time. But soon I discovered many more English mods hosted on Nexus. As the best pupil in my English class, I decided to do the translations myself.

Opening file in a text editor and editing strings by hand didn’t work. Thanks to ag.ru guy I learned TES Construction Set and started messing around in the game world. Which can be quite addicting.

Why I prefer modded games

Some people I know say that they prefer a game the way developers did it, but I completely disagree. The community is often more passionate than studio workers doing their jobs to get paid.

This is exactly the case with the Elder Scrolls series. On Nexus sites, Oblivion has around 29 thousand mods, while Skyrim has a whooping 60 thousand! Not all is worth looking into, but using some of those one can create almost anything out of his/her game world. It’s the most configurable game I ever played.

I think vanilla Oblivion or Skyrim are just bare bones. Spending as little as half an hour, you can get a huge improvement the most popular graphic and overhaul mods. On their own, these games don’t offer nearly as much fun.

An example. The combat essentially is “click till it dies” and “when low on health, use a potion”. This poor variety reduces most engagements to three factors: character’s health pool, damage per second and a supply of consumables.

With KEa’s Magic and Skill extender, Oblivion becomes a very tactical game, where a wrong decision immediately results in traumas or death. Sadly, the mod is only in Russian.

In my opinion, the only good things vanilla Oblivion has is a variety of regions with differing climates and entertaining quests.

My mods

Fort Farragut

Like most players, I enjoyed the Dark Brotherhood questline. So the first mod published back in 2010 is called Farragut Renewed. It transformed the secret lair of assassin Lucien Lachance. Now the player could use it as a long-term base of operations. I loved adding little details all over the place, like an alchemical garden with poisonous mushrooms, target dummies and assassin mannequins. It gave the place more individuality.

Scarier wraiths

Later I learned basics of editing 3d-models used by the game engine. This gave me an idea to remove a face of the in-game wraith so it would look like an evil Nazgul from LOTR. Surprisingly, it’s the most endorsed of the mods, despite it literally took 10 seconds to remove that face.

Alchemical bombs

Two years later me and scripter named Visman made a mod with actual throwable bombs. He did the coding, even involving an invisible rat guiding the explosions. I created locations, looked for sounds and textures, and did a lore set-up. Bombs themselves aren’t part of Elder Scrolls lore, and some care about consistency of the game world.

The story told of an alchemist who discovered a formula to make any alchemical substance explosive. He set up a laboratory in a dungeon and blew up the old tunnels to stop the undead from coming his way. The guy was also supplying Dark Brotherhood with his creations. I loved designing the secret lair and putting tons of details and hints there. He had a diary describing why exactly the formula works and a guardian wraith floating around the room.

Another part of the mod was a challenge to find the most powerful bombs scattered through mystic Ayleid ruins. It extended the gameplay by adding value to looking around and searching thoroughly. Some containers are accessible only through clever tricks. One requires the player to step on a trap that would otherwise crush him against the ceiling. When lifted high enough, he has to jump off to reach the chest on a top of a pillar.

Thieves’ highway Anvil

The next one I created was an extension to already existing mod Thieves’ Highway. It placed ladders, ropes and hatches across the roofs of the Empire’s capital. These allow a sneaky character to traverse the city undetected.

I picked the port city of Anvil and placed a bunch of crates, ladders and barrels to help reach the roofs. Some houses now had climbable brickworks. I took a stone block model and removed collision from it, so it wouldn’t be affected by physics. Then I placed a lot of these these on the chimneys to indicate interactivity. It was fun as I tried to flawlessly fit these into texture pattern. However, they were practically unusable in this state. Invisible doors at a base and top of the chimneys is what actually moved the player around.

Unfinished mods

Among the pile of unfinished work, two projects stand out.

The first aimed to add the similar roof paths to another city, which had architecture close to medieval. A player could use steam or drain pipes to climb high up. I got tired of connecting all those little pieces of pipes and dropped the idea. Most houses in that city have very steep roofs anyway.

The second project was about a dungeon with unusual puzzles and layout ideas. The thing is still laying somewhere on the hard drive. Most default dungeons in the game are very bland and were create by copy-pasting. In contrast, I wanted a player to experience a memorable adventure.

It had its own story of a underground city with a king overtaken by the necro-magic, which led to a catastrophic end.

The first level, which I almost finished, is almost fully underwater. The player had to act really fast or pack a lot of water breathing potions. The passages are tilted, so navigation is harder than usual. The traps and slaughterfish swimming about were other things to overcome.

The tunnels overgrown with vines, crystals and tropical plants lead into a creepy place with giant bones decorating the walls and flesh growing in the lightless rooms. There were ideas for physics-based puzzles and a boss which could only be defeated by first finding a special scroll which makes him vulnerable. But the whole project required too much patience from me, so I dropped it. Maybe someday I’ll finish it. People spend their time on things that make even less sense.

Translating stuff is fun

Community cares

I was surprised, but there are people who like to play the game as much as I do. The Russian communities are usually a lot smaller than their English counterparts. Still, to this day there’s about ten people who constantly provide feedback on my translation and around 100 unique downloads of the file itself. Imagine a room with 100 people in it using something you’ve done purely for fun.

Connecting with other modders

The sites where I hosted the translations had a strict policy. First, you have to get author’s permission to translate and host the mod. I re-read some of those old letters. Well… I’m certain my level of English significantly improved during the university years.

Many sites didn’t ask anyone at all: a Russian pirating tradition. They’ve stolen my translations, too, without mentioning the source. But at least people had fun with them, which was my goal anyway.

Involves a lot of creativity

For large-scale mods, you have to maintain standards when you translate it. There are references to the lore and I had to find the official Russian translations using Morrowind Wiki.

Particular items inside the mod are connected, and you have to name them all in the same way. Sometimes that’s not obvious. You have to look back when encountering something that makes you feel you’ve seen it before. A fancy named creature and the ingredient that it drops. Or a trap and a poison that can be obtained by disarming it. A faction or a character mentioned separately in the dialogues, books and items sections.

You create style and feeling of the translation by using certain words over the others. I personally enjoy the old fan-made translations from the 90s, as they had a lot of personality. They weren’t professional, but lack of studio correctness is what made them spicy and memorable.

I took a liberty of such indirect translations myself. For example, in Maskar’s Oblivion Overhaul the NPC had name and surname constructed out of two pieces each. The names weren’t fitting into the lore: Argonians, the reptilian people, had Greek names as a basis. I changed those back closer to the lore and replaced all the surnames with racially-themed nicknames.

Tech skills come in handy

There’s some technical aspects to it, as well. Many strings used in-game are defined inside the scripts. Quite hard to find, too. The translated scripts have to be recompiled. Some of the grammar has to be adapted to not sound awkward in Russian, which means changing string formatting by hand.

What makes it a lot worse is that whether there’s a mod update, I have a fresh English version. The object names and book texts can be imported automatically. But all the proper scripts have to be modified by hand. And which of those did I change and how, exactly?

That’s where diff tools come to the rescue. They allow me to see what scripts were changed and which ones I previously translated. The translation and recompiling still has to be done by hand, though.

Strings defined in the scripts can be found using a regular expression matching text inside the double quotes.

Useful for your English

Translating mods in the high school is why I went straight to an advanced English class in the university. Practicing a skill gives it a big boost, especially if done regularly. We had our site updated with translations every two months or so.

This is why I’m able to write these big posts without much effort. It’s sill hard to generate natural and rich text that feels completely OK to native speakers, but I’m working on it.